It Is Constitution Day!

September 17th is Constitution Day. You can read the document here:

http://patriotpost.us/document/the-constitution-of-the-united-states-of-america/

On this day, of all days, we should remember that the Constitution says what it means, and means what it says. It needs neither embellishment, discovery of penumbras, interpretation, nor improvement.

What it DOES need is a government that believes it is bound by the terms of the Constitution, or a citizenry that is willing to force the government back within the limited powers set forth in the Constitution.

The Constitution is a living document, not because judges unconstitutionally create new rights from the bench, but because of this one important clause:

Article. V.
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

Article V sets forth the only manners by which the United States Constitution may be changed. You will notice that Article V does not say "a majority of the supreme Court determine so."

If there is a finer national Constitution, I have not found it. We should all rededicate ourselves to being governed by the letter of the Constitution.

God bless our Republic. God save the Constitution. Let freedom ring.

Today is the Anniversary of the First Veto

April 5, 1792 is the anniversary of the first Presidential veto ever cast in the United States. George Washington vetoed the Apportionment Bill, and provided the following message to Congress.

Gentlemen of the House of Representatives,

I have maturely considered the Act passed by the two Houses, intitled, "An Act for an apportionment of Representatives among the several States according to the first enumeration," and I return it to your House, wherein it originated, with the following objections.

First—The Constitution has prescribed that representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers: and there is no one proportion or divisor which, applied to the respective numbers of the States will yield the number and allotment of representatives proposed by the Bill.

Second—The Constitution has also provided that the number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand; which restriction is, by the context, and by fair and obvious construction, to be applied to the seperate and respective numbers of the States: and the bill has allotted to eight of the States, more than one for thirty thousand.

George Washington


How I long for the day when we again have a President that reads the bill, applies a Constitutional standard to the bill, and vetoes it because the bill is at odds with the plain language of the Constitution.

The Inexorable Force of the Market and the Unbearable Weight of Government

In the ongoing debate regarding the Democrat's nationalization of health care, precious little time is being focused on a discussion of the actual market changes that will occur as a result of the passage and implementation of this unconstitutional piece of legislation.

What today’s Democrats, and believers in Government action of all stripes, believe is that the market is like a giant Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man – giant, lumbering, and able to withstand nearly any amount of central committee diktats without really changing either its nature or behavior. Of course, the real-life evidence is that the market is agile, responsive, demanding, fickle, and smarter than bureaucrats.

Tinkering with reimbursement rates on socialized medicine programs in an effort to realize “savings” to government bodies already occurs. The effect of the tinkering is that it shrinks the supply of goods and services being bought by the socialized medicine program recipients.

In a self-regulating market, a decrease in supply will result in an increase in prices, which will decrease the total demand for the product or service, and the market will find its equilibrium at the new higher price. However, in a world of government price controls, such as the reimbursement rates for prescription drugs in a Medicare plan, while the supply is decreasing, the price cannot change which inevitable leads to rationing or shortages. Demand will outstrip supply.

What the government relies on in this scenario is a belief that businesses are irrational – they will conduct their primary business in a way that causes financial loss. As we are seeing now in Washington state, several pharmacy chains are ceasing to fill new Medicare prescriptions because they lose money on the deal.

What is a Democrat to do when her great economic schemes wash up on the rocks of reality? Step 1 is denial. “Doug Porter, the state's director of Medicaid, said Medicaid recipients should be able to readily find another pharmacy because "we have many more pharmacy providers in our network than we need."

Step 2 is anger. “Insurance profits are bad for my health.” And we are being defrauded by “fly by night operators.”

Step 3 is more government diktats. Hey, “we won the election.”

Soon, Washington state will make accepting Medicare prescriptions mandatory for a pharmacy license. Democrats are happy to force people to do things as a “cost of doing business.” In practical respects, this means costs for things that are not Medicare prescriptions will go up. This is an indirect tax on all consumers at the pharmacy, including food and medicine brought to you by enlightened bureaucrats.

More philosophically, being forced to do business in a manner that is not a purely voluntary transaction is slavery. Being forced to do things because the government says you should (like buying health insurance whether you want to or not) is slavery. Even a fifth grader knows the 13th Amendment prohibits slavery. The question is: are Democrats smarter than a fifth grader.

James Madison on Obamacare, Bailouts, and Car Giveaways

"[T]he government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government." --James Madison

A Kenyan Birth Registration Appears

While I have been leery of claims that B. Hussein Obama is constitutionally prohibited from holding the Office of the President of the United States, I can at least understand that the constitutionalists have a valid point regarding B. Hussein Obama's "most transparent administration in history" lack of transparency on the issue of releasing the State of Hawaii Department of Health Certification of a Live Birth document issued in August of 1964.

While the Certification of a Certificate document released by the Obama campaign last year is invalid on its face by its own terms, a competing Kenyan certification of birth has emerged today as a competing claim on Obama's birth narrative.

Let the battle of the documents begin.

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=105764

More Thoughts on Sotomayor

We know that Republican appointments to the Supreme Court have been hit and miss - for every Scalia there is a Souter, for every Rehnquist there is an Earl Warren, for every Thomas there is a Stevens.

The Democrats, no disappointments -- all liberal appointments are liberals, through and through. Often, they reflect the liberal nuance of the liberal appointing them.

Enter former Constitutional Law instructor B. Hussein Obama. In 2001, the Marxist Obama held forth the following about the Supreme Court and obsession number one for him -- redistribution of wealth.

"If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. One of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that."

Now, we know the Anointed One wants a Supreme Court Justice that has "empathy" with the suffering from not enough Supreme Court redistribution of wealth. His perfect SCOTUS candidate was described as follows: "I will seek someone who understands that justice ... is about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives, whether they can make a living and care for their families ... and welcome in their own nation. I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes."

The concept of justice being blind is a fundamental requirement of justice, because it is not justice when the cards are stacked in favor of one party over another. A judge is not a judge if she applies empathy towards a party to strive for a "just outcome." At that point, the judge takes off the blind and becomes an unelected policy maker.

It is precisely in this judge as policymaker position which Sonia Sotomayor feels comfortable, if you look at her own words. One point of Sotomayor's now-famous La Raza speech was that the life experiences of women and minorities in the law often inform - nay, dictate - the ultimate outcome of a case, leading to some greater overall, racially- economically- or gender-sensitive "justice." In her speech, she rejects neutral application of the law to the facts, but instead supports some idea that a minority or female judge's"richness of life experiences" will ensure that they necessarily will not reach the same conclusion as a white male judge. In fact, she seems to indicate that female Hispanic judges would be the wisest of all. I assume she draws this conclusion from our rich history of famous and oft-quoted Latina judges.

Sotomayor also said that appeals courts are there to "make policy." Not judge the cases presented to them on the record -- make policy.

Sonia Sotomayor was hand-picked by Barak Obama to do on the Supreme Court what Barak Obama was disappointed that the Civil Rights movements of the 50s and 60s did not do -- press for equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity. They are both anti-Constitutionalist radicals cut from the same cloth.

If the GOP cannot muster a solid opposition to this anti-Equal Protection radical, there is little use left for the GOP.